This blog will be used for 2011 IMEC interns Daniel Peng, Lauren Chinn, and Joanna Tsao from the Johns Hopkins INBT IRES program (http://inbt.jhu.edu/education/undergraduate/ires/). Daniel is a class of 2013 Biomedical Engineering major. Lauren is a class of 2012 Molecular and Cellular Biology major. Joanna is a class of 2012 Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering major.

6/18/2011

Hello from Leuven, Belgium! I was so excited when I found out my project proposal had been accepted by the INBT/IRES program, and I can hardly believe we're here with the opportunity to work at IMEC! We've been so busy getting settled and starting work on our projects, but we've had a little time to explore the weekends. We arrived on May 31st, a day early for our June 1st orientation. Ascension, a Belgian national holiday, was observed on June 2nd, and since it fell on a Thursday, the following Friday was also generally not considered a work day. For us, this meant we had time to adjust to the time difference, which was made especially difficult by the long daylight hours here--the sun generally rises around 6:00 am, and it doesn't get dark until 10:00 pm! (We're six hours ahead of Baltimore, and twelve hours ahead of my hometown: Honolulu, Hawaii.)

Fiesta Europa, an organized festival that invites vendors from different European countries to set up an open market style event, happened to be in Leuven that weekend. It was set up in the center of the town at Ladeuzeplein, the large square behind the Katholieke University Library. At night there were pyrotechnic performances, fireworks, and a drum performance! The next day, we stumbled upon Circus & Co. in the park just North of the square just in time to watch some of the acrobatic performances. One of the routines we saw was entirely in Dutch, but humorous nonetheless.

In general, Leuven is a small city, the center of which is enclosed by a circular highway. Everywhere is reachable by bike, and for many of the large student population here (including ourselves), that's the primary mode of transportation. We bike to work, to go grocery shopping, and pretty much anytime we need to get around. After only two weeks here, I can't imagine not having my lime-green bike, and am very glad my Dad taught me to ride when I was little!

I'm on the JHU Fencing team, and in order to continue training thorughout the summer, I've found a fencing club in Leuven! At open fencing the other day, I learned that streets ending in 'straat' (street) refer to the part of that street that is inside the circular highway, and those ending in 'steenweg' refer to streets outside of the circle. 'Steenweg' comes from 'stone road', refering to roads that were not paved. It's little things like this that make me love Leuven more and more. Language has been an adjustment, but most people in Leuven are bilingual, speaking both Dutch and English, so we haven't encountered many problems. Many of the signs and labels, however, are dutch only, which leads to interesting grocery purchases. We've bought buttermilk and Speculoos, mistaking them for milk and peanut butter respectively. Speculoos is very good gingerbread spread, but a bit surprise if you're not expecting it!

Orientation consisted of a tour of the four buildings, as well as basic safety training. The exterior of IMEC is very pretty in summer. Sheltered by glass coverings, the open walkways connecting the buildings are flanked by greenery on either side. The inside of the IMEC facilities is nothing short of impressive. We work mainly at IMEC One, which houses offices, labs, and the research clean room. To get to lab every morning after stopping at our desks, we walk through the support floor of the clean room--an overwhelming labyrinth of pipes, valves, and gauges to supply the various manufacturing machines housed above.

The clean rooms are amazing: giant ballrooms filled with researchers quietly preparing silicon wafers for patterning amongst machines the size of an average bedroom. Protective, light plastic clothing, rubber shoe coverings, and eye protection is de riguer as they perform precisely choreographed protocols. One clean room is a Class 1 (One particle per cubic meter) while another more recently set up clean room is rated Class 1000. However, this is because the equipment is nearly completely automatic, and does not require the wafers to be exposed to the clean room environment while being transferred into the machine.

At IMEC, lab access is controlled by your keycard, or badge. The majority of the first week consisted of required safety training in the Convergence lab and Neuroelectronics lab to be given access, as well as training in tissue culture, confocal microscopy, and fluorescent microscopy. In order to use any equipment, you must first be granted access by the 'lab responsible', the person in charge of that tool.

My project here at IMEC is a continuation of work previously performed by Professor Sharon Gerecht's lab at JHU. I will be microcontact printing silicon micropillar substrates manufactured here at IMEC with components of the extracellular matrix, fibronectin and type IV collagen, in parallel patterns. Endothelial cells will first be cultured on the substrates, and then transferred to fibrin and type I collagen gels respectively via inversion of the substrates. The goal of the project is to enhance and control tubulogenesis.

Last week consisted mainly of test prints and optimization of the protocol to make sure the printing and fluorescent staining process were consistent. Joanna and I are using the same cell lines, and we thawed a vial of each this past week. Hopefully they will be confluent (Will have a cell density high enough that we can use them in experiments and pass them to a new flask to continue the culture) early next week, which means I could test the entire process!

I can't wait to see more of the city, and hopefully will be traveling more on weekends! I'd love to have more pictures to share with you!

I didn't want to repeat anything that Daniel or Lauren wrote so this time, I only wrote about my research here.

My project here at IMEC is a collaboration combining the research that I have done at the Gerecht Lab (http://www.jhu.edu/chembe/gerecht/) at Hopkins with some of the research done here. The Gerecht lab has previously examined the effect of micropatterned fibronectin on 2D glass substrates on endothelial tube formation. Research at IMEC has used stiff silicon processed nail beds and examined their effect on both mature and endothelial cell culture. This summer, I hope to continue and combine the research done by both institutions by fabricating soft 3D substrates from PDMS and examining their effect on endothelial tube formation.

Last week, I began to optimize PDMS conditions in order to best create the soft substrates, as well as familiarizing myself with IMEC's facilities and protocols. This week, I hope to perform some of the controls for the project.

Looks like we'll be blogging on here this summer - the three of us (Lauren, Joanna, and me) are undergraduates from the Johns Hopkins INBT (Institute for NanoBioTechnology) IRES (International Research Experience for Students) program. Long name, I know, but in short we're all working on collaboration projects between our labs at Hopkins and imec. I'm an incoming junior at Hopkins majoring in biomedical engineering.

Back at Hopkins I work in Dr. Jordan Green's lab(http://web1.johnshopkins.edu/greengroup/). In the Green Group I am trying to optimize polymers for properties such as degradation rate, buffer capacity, particle size, and binding affinity for effective gene delivery. I'm crosslinking some of these polymers into gel reservoirs to store drugs and combining the gels with nanoparticles worked on at imec that can be optically or magnetically heated for a controlled drug delivery system. I'll detail my summer project at imec in a later post.

A little delayed, but we arrived safely in the cozy city of Leuven, Belgium 2 weeks ago! After unpacking, the first thing we did was rent bikes for the next 10 weeks, since the majority of Leuven residents bike. Our apartment is a 15-minute bike ride to imec, so like many other imec employees, that's how we get to work! The first weekend (4-day weekend) we spent here happened to be Fiesta Europa, an international festival in Leuven which consisted of a weekend-long farmer's market, fire-related shows, and some circus performances.